Quality Street Fair

Earlier today Alexander went to the Quality Street Fair, we walked from home with Alexander in the buggy.

Quality
Street was shut off to traffic for the fair and it was quite busy with
a two way flow of people up and down the various stalls on the pavement
on both sides of the road.

The first thing that really grabbed
Alexander’s attention was the local council’s recycling stand, but not
because he is particularly green. What fired his enthusiasm were the
helium filled balloons that they were giving away. As I walked past
slowly Alexander’s head turned until he was leaning out of the buggy
looking behind us. We turned back to get a balloon and a young woman
was taken by Alexander. She gushed about how nice he was and got him a
balloon without me asking. She also gave us a cloth shopping bag to
promote recycling.

Having
secured the balloon we carried on along the street. There were loads of
stalls selling brica brac and several reffles, a tombola, a candy floss
stall (I bought a bag of it which I ate on the way home), a creperie
etc. As well as all of that there was a bouncy castle, although
Alexander is still a bit small for that sort of thing, a childrens
waltzer with large tea cups, a magician (which we watched for a few
minutes and it wasn’t bad at all), a human fruit machine (three people
from the Gatton Park Players putting on a display of being a fruit
machine and advertising their upcoming Canterbury Tales production. At
the end of the street there was a barbecue and also a tea and cake
stall with a load of trestle tables and chairs for people to sit down
and either drink their tea or eat their barbecue.

I took
Alexander out of the buggy and let him walk about a bit and also
carried him while I pushed the buggy so that he had a good view of the
goings on. He loved the children running around, definitely he sees
himself as an older child and not a baby. Too far ahead of himself yet.
Anyway we had a go on the tombola and Alexander picked the tickets out
of the bowl, but sadly we didn’t win anything.

Going through
the various stalls was interesting, although I had to rescue a few
things from Alexander to stop him breaking them. We didn’t see anything
that we actually wanted although there were several interesting things
including some ancient sewing machines. We spent just over an hour
wandering round and looking at things and just as were making our way
back out of Quality Street the wind blew the balloon loose and it made
its way skywards, much to Alexander’s astonishment (he just stared at
it going up and up).

Luckily the young woman that had first
given us the balloon saw this happen and she came back over with a new
balloon, so I took a happy wee boy back home for lunch. He had a nap in
the buggy while I walked home and as I type he is having a post lunch
sleep.